Spent $600 on aerial for a land parcel that told buyers nothing

The failure sits at the brief, and it is the most common one in aerial land marketing. Two things are worth separating.

Light and season. Aerial footage of topography depends on shadow to read as anything other than a plane. Early morning and the hour before sunset give you raking light that shows a grade change of a few feet. Overcast noon in November gives you flat brown. A pilot who shoots land knows this, and the fix costs nothing except scheduling flexibility, which is why it belongs in the booking conversation rather than in a reshoot.

Boundaries. A drawn outline on an overhead still is generated from county parcel data or GIS layers, and its accuracy is whatever that layer's accuracy is. It is a marketing illustration. It is not a boundary determination, and only a licensed surveyor can give you that. Label it as approximate on the image itself, because a buyer who forms a belief about what he is buying from your video is a problem later. Disclosure obligations around what you represent in marketing differ by state, so confirm yours with your attorney before you publish overlays.

On the money: $600 then $475 is $1,075 for one usable package. A written shot list would likely have produced it in one visit. At a minimum specify flight time of day, whether corners are flagged, one overhead with an approximate outline, road frontage and access, and the delivery format and turnaround. Get it in the engagement, not in a text thread. Providers who work acreage regularly will have their own version of that list and will hand it to you unprompted.

The pond question would have made me sick to my stomach. Nineteen acres of brown and a water feature that belongs to somebody else, in the same frame.

I'd argue the four months of carry wasn't the media's fault. You listed land in November with brown fields. Even with perfect footage a lot of land buyers go dormant until they can walk it. The reshoot in March coincided with the season turning on, and you may be crediting the flags for what the calendar did.

@quarry that's fair but the flags cost $475 and the season cost nothing, so the flags are still the cheap part of the lesson. @meridian, did you flag just the corners or the whole road frontage line? Corners alone still leave a viewer guessing at 19 acres.

As the buyer type you were trying to reach: brown is fine, I can read winter land. What I can't do is guess boundaries, and I close the tab when I can't tell what's included. Frontage clip and the outline are the two things I look for and most land listings have neither.